Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, with Fagin,
Sykes, the Artful Dodger and children trained as pickpockets and sent out as
burglar's accomplices, provides an unforgettable fictional image of the Victorian
underworld. Fagin's Children is an account of the reality of child
crime in nineteenth-century Britain and the reac-tion of the authorities to it.
It reveals both the poverty and misery of many children's lives in the growing
industrial cities of Britain and of changing attitudes towards the problem.
Inevitably most is known about children who were arrested. While few
children were hanged after 1800, their treatment ranged from whipping to imprisonment,
sometimes in the hulks, and transportation. Increasingly, elements of training
and reclamation came into a system principally aimed at punishment.
Fagin's Children is an original and important contrihution both to
the history of Victorian crime and to the history of childhood.
JEANNIE DUCKWORTH has written widely on nineteenth-century crime.
